iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 19h

My favourite reply to an AI image

Reddit comment that says “Begone, flanker.”

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Eviction is a health issue. May her memory be a blessing.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

William Morris died 130 years today. Lately I’ve been reading more of his thoughts about art and labour and I think they are particularly relevant these days, in this age of AI and genocide and inequality. Here is the Revival of Handicrafts, 1888 www.marxists.org/archive/morr...

William Morris strawberry thief design. Repeating pattern of birds and flowers (and strawberries) in vibrant blues, greens, yellows and reds.

We do most certainly need happiness in our daily work, content in our daily rest; and all this cannot be if we hand over the whole responsibility of the details of our daily life to machines and their drivers.

The cultivated middle class is a class of slave-holders, and its power of living according to its choice is limited by the necessity of finding constant livelihood and employment for the slaves who keep it alive.
It is only a society of equals which can choose the life it will live, which can choose to forgo gross luxury and base utilitarianism in return for the unwearying pleasure of tasting the fulness of life. It is my firm belief that we shall in the end realize this society of equals, and also that when it is realized it will not endure a vicarious life by means of machinery; that it will in short be the master of its machinery and not the servant, as our age is.
Meantime, since we shall have to go through a long series of social and political events before we shall be free to choose how we shall live, we should welcome even the feeble protest with is now being made against the vulgarization of all life: first because it is one token amongst others of the sickness of modern civilization; and next, because it may help to keep alive memories of the past which are necessary elements of the life of the future, and methods of work which no society could afford to lose.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

William Morris lecturing to art students, 1882 www.marxists.org/archive/morr...

I don't want to find fault anywhere if I can help it, but you must pardon me for saying that if our law-makers and law-administrators, our practical common sense men of business, who can be trusted worked half as hard, and single-heartedly as our real artists do - why England would be quite a decent place to live in.

Two courses lie open to us; the first to sit down deedless, and pretend that we believe all is well and better, to let our material prosperity drag us into deeds of injustice at home and abroad: to destroy the prosperity both material and spiritual of far-off countries in the name of civilization, while at home we weakly try to palliate with our left hand the miseries we have recklessly raised with our right: to sit still and feign content, though we know that for all men day by day is less and less leisure, more and more wearisome work unworthy of men; to gather if we be rich some share of material prosperity to us, making an island in the sea of squalor, and hoping at least that we shall be eaten last or one of the last.
That is the one course open to us when we know that we have become the slaves of the tyrant we have made for ourselves: and the other what is that? Daily and hourly resistance to our tyrant. Ceaseless plotting of rebellion against him, till one day it breaks out openly and reduces him to his old condition of servant again: a heavy task you may say, even those of you who have your eyes open, and know the monster which we have misnamed commerce for what he is.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

William Morris on the aims of art, 1886. www.marxists.org/archive/morr...

Now if it be true, as I have asserted, that genuine art is an unmixed blessing to the world, this is a serious matter; for at first sight it seems to show that there will soon be no art at all in the world, which will thus lose an unmixed blessing: it can ill afford to do that, I think.

For art, if it has to die, has worn itself out, and its aim will be a thing forgotten; and its aim was to make work happy and rest fruitful. Is all work to be unhappy, all rest unfruitful, then? Indeed if art is to perish that will be the case, unless something is to take its place; something at present unnamed, undreamed of.

I do not think that anything will take the place of art; not that I doubt the ingenuity of man, which seems to be boundless in the direction of making himself unhappy, but because I believe the springs of art in the human mind to be deathless, and also because it seems to me easy to see the causes of the present obliteration of the arts.

For we civilised people have not given them up consciously, or of our free will; we have been forced to give them up. Perhaps I can illustrate that by the detail of the application of machinery to the production of things in which artistic form of some sort is possible.
Why does a reasonable man use a machine?
Surely to save his labour. There are some

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Reposted by Hannah Main

Suzanne Rent @suzannerent.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This report says we have a “culture of no.” I think our leaders correct. Hear me out! The province and feds push resource extraction, AI, “bolder ambitions,” and so on. We say no to these things because they’re what our leaders want, not what we want. aep-peca.ca/en/final-rep...

aep-peca.ca

Final Report - Atlantic Economic Panel | Panel économique du Canada atlantique

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

As someone who studied rural sociology of Atlantic Canada, I 100% agree! To simplify, the economic history of this region has been one of extraction of resources and labour. If that was the key to prosperity here, we’d all be very well-off.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Carter Hart is tending goal tonight in the Golden Knights’ opener in Vegas. This is a post about Cornell. 🙃

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Yes!! I think this is part of a sinister goal, which is to paint EVs as luxury purchases. As long as embracing green tech is seen as something that only the elites do, it’s easier to push through environmentally-regressive policies— the detractors are just out of touch with regular folk.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I went to the big Mahone Bay book sale this morning and had to get this pre-marked up Sheila Heti volume. I really like Sheila Heti but I fear she is divisive!

Copy of Pure Colour by Sheila Heti, with the word Colour crossed out in Sharpie and the word Bullshit written beside it.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I happened to be in Amherst today and the good people there were talking up their municipal water and dude… I filled up my water bottle there and it’s some of the best water I’ve ever tasted. Has anyone ever done a taste test of the various NS waters? I genuinely think that nothing can beat Amherst.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Off grid update. Working from home this morning. It’s been steadily raining but we are still producing more power than we are using. The batteries are starting to fill up (71% is honestly low for us but we were charging the car yesterday).

A dashboard of an app that shows power usage. There are 421 watts coming in from solar panels and the house is using 154 watts.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Watched The Sheep Detectives last night expecting to see a delightful murder mystery. Instead here I am sobbing over such characters and concepts as “Sebastian the sheep” and “transom lamb”

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

So Timbercreek has restructured— I believe it was a REIT during the events Farha is referring to (though not 100% sure of timelines). At some point it was sold to private equity and later split into different entities

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Also, of note, the example she uses is of Timbercreek. They have rebranded as Hazelview. Hazelview has a few properties in HRM.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Leilani Farha is in Halifax today doing a Massey Lecture on this very topic! In this piece, she notes that the first residential REIT in Canada launched in 1997. There was a world before REITs. I know there will be a world after REITs. thewalrus.ca/the-corporat...

thewalrus.ca

The Corporate Takeover of Canada’s Apartments Is Worse than You Think | The Walrus

Property investors have discovered that getting rid of tenants is very good business

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I was in grade 4. It was show-and-tell that day. I didn’t hear what happened until I got home after school. I remember watching it on our basement TV.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Anyway, our report cites a lot of literature from other regions because it is so tricky to draw connections here. If anyone has an idea on how to use data to figure out who the ‘good’ landlords are, I’m very interested!! But so far, the academic consensus seems to be that bigger is not better.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

So anecdotally my thought is that financialized landlords can take advantage of tenants while following the law, and small landlords can take advantage of tenants because sometimes it seems like they have never even cracked open the RTA.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

On the other hand, anecdotally I do agree with Deny’s piece sometimes— mom-and-pop landlords can suck! You never know what you’re going to get with a small landlord. We’ve seen it all. Asking for a portion of rent in cash (presumably to commit tax fraud??), locking tenants out, egregious conditions.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

But I think it’s also a bit of a numbers game. If you file to keep everyone’s security deposit, some will dispute it, but many tenants won’t. The cost of a few disputes might be worth it for a landlord.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

You’ll see financialized landlords sort of systematically doing things like filing to keep security deposits (even when the tenant didn’t cause damage) or issuing notices to quit for non-payment of rent. This is not illegal. It is their right.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

All that being said: Anecdotally, I would say that tenants with financialized landlords tend to have issues related to legal disputes, while tenants with mom-and-pop landlords tend to have issues with their landlord doing blatantly illegal things. There are always exceptions. Here’s what I mean:

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

And of course, we mostly hear from tenants who have bad landlords. Tenants who have 0 problems are not the tenants who are coming to Dal Legal Aid!

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Likewise, we do collect some data on our social justice clinic. We see about 700 people a year with tenancy issues. However, that doesn’t represent all tenants. We hold clinics in specific neighbourhoods— the south end, Gottingen, and North Dartmouth, so are more in tune with those areas.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

You could try to see which landlords are over-represented in Small Claims disputes. That *might* be a clue about how litigious they are or how likely they are to evict. But I’d be cautious about drawing any conclusions from that.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

What IS public is Small Claims Court cases. One could pull the Civil Index of all the Small Claims Court cases involving landlord-tenant disputes. But we know that only a fraction of landlords-tenant disputes make it to the small claims court.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

For example, the prevalence of fixed-term leases in the province means that something might *feel* like an eviction to a tenant— they may be moving out involuntarily— but it won’t be filed as an eviction because it’s just a lease ending.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Why is it hard to figure this out in Halifax? Well, the data on evictions and residential tenancies disputes are not public. Plus, I’m not convinced that even if they *were* public, that would tell the whole story.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Appreciate this critique of our report. Deny is someone whose opinion I respect because I know he spends a lot of time digging into housing data.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

*77.2% of units in the registry

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A big part of this research is just questioning what balance looks like. When a small number of landlords own a majority of tenants' homes, is balancing needs actually just? How can our legislation better protect tenants?

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Anyway: At Dalhousie Legal Aid, we are mainly interested in the residential tenancies dispute process, because that's where we serve tenants. The provincial government talks about balancing the needs of landlords and tenants in the dispute process.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Also: We were in the middle of analysis when StatCan came out with their report on investor ownership. They use different methods, and their data is from 2022, but if for some reason you don't want to take our word for it, you can see their report here: www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/46-28...

www150.statcan.gc.ca

Individual and institutional investors in the Canadian housing market

In this article, the Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP) is releasing data on investors in the residential housing market by size. Concentration in the residential housing market is analyzed fo...

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

We tinkered with this a bit-- where should the cut-off be? But landed on cutting it off between 4 and 5 units because that's also how our Residential Tenancies Act tends to distinguish between buildings for things like renovictions or owners moving in.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Q: Why didn't you analyze buildings with 4 or fewer units? A: The first reason is research capacity. There were 12,000+ properties in the rental registry. When we exclude buildings with <5 units, that leaves 1,420 properties, a more manageable number that also represents 77.2% of the registry.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

We also found that 20 landlords control 28,624 units, which ends up being 56% of the units in our dataset of buildings with 5+ units. Killam makes up a big chunk of that, with 5,350 units in our dataset.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Q: What were your main findings? A: We found that financial and chain landlords owned a majority of units in the dataset. Note that this is true even if we account for the units that were not in our analysis.

A pie chart showing that chain landlords own 37% of units, financial landlords own 19% of units, multiple owner landlords own 13%, 4% of units are chain managed, non-profits own 2%, single owner landlords own 2%, and co-ops and unknown landlords each round down to 0% each. Buildings with 4 or fewer units represent 23% of the pie chart.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

We then identified the registered directors of any businesses that owned properties. Then we coded each property into categories (e.g. financial, chain, non-profit).

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Q: How did you find ownership? A: We used the HRM Rental Registry to identify registered rental units. We took a sample of properties from that dataset that represents 77.2% of units (50,759 units/1,420 properties), and used the provincial land registry to identify the registered owners.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Q: Why are you doing this research? A: First, we believe in greater transparency of ownership data. Also, research from other jurisdictions shows a correlation between greater financialization and higher rates of evictions, less affordability, and worse housing conditions for tenants.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Today we are launching a new report: Who Owns Halifax: A Report on Rental Housing Ownership in the HRM. It is available to read here. I thought I would address common questions about the report below. www.tenantsrightsguide.ca/research#own...

tenantsrightsguide.ca

Housing Research | Learn More, Support Housing Justice — Dalhousie Legal Aid - Tenants' Rights Guide

Explore housing research and tenant rights insights from Dalhousie Legal Aid to promote housing justice and access to legal support in Nova Scotia.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

You’ll see that buildings with four or fewer units represented 22.8% of all units in the registry, but represented the majority of properties. StatCan used different methods— looking at property values rather than # of properties/units— and came to similar conclusions. Happy to discuss methodology

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Reposted by Hannah Main

Suzanne Rent @suzannerent.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

In today's Morning File, Jennifer Henderson has the latest from the Nova Scotia legislature. And I interviewed Hannah Main, a community legal worker with Dalhousie Legal Aid, which did a study this summer called "Who Owns Halifax." www.halifaxexaminer.ca/morning-file...

halifaxexaminer.ca

'Who owns Halifax?' Dalhousie Legal Aid report finds 20 landlords own 56% of the city's housing units - Halifax Examiner

"I find it pretty egregious when you have a multinational REIT with investors all over Canada or the world who essentially are making their money from renting out low-income apartments."

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Anyway we should all be very angry because a better world is possible, but small-minded politicians and businessmen have made it their life’s mission to prevent it. Many of us want an economy and a society anchored by CARE.

Print with flowers and the text “We carry a new world here in our hearts. This world is growing this minute.”
And the caption from artist collective justseeds: Beautiful reduction print from @missprints!
"This print is anchored around a quote by Buenaventura Durruti "We carry a new world here in our hearts...

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

We celebrate and hold news conferences at the prospect of more “defense jobs” in our province. Jobs that will feed the endless war machine. We have an upside-down view that will contribute to our common good. Meanwhile, we worry that giving more money to the poor will encourage degeneracy.

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Hannah Main @hannahmain.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

All this, because our society is obsessed with the Protestant work ethic and productivity. We think it’s a greater social ill to have some people who don’t work, than to have some people die on the streets.

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